Arranging sprites

[Bakunin]

Uhm... Hi, guys. Currently, I'm not making a game, but I am studying RPG Maker a little more to have conditions in order to make a good game in the future and I'm having problems with arranging sprites when I'm "making" new resources.

Making battlers for side-view battles, making animations (and other things) has been quite a headache to me. I've got sprites and I arrange them in Photoshop upon templates, but the result is always a failure, because the position of the sprites in the image sheet never gets perfectly arranged, so I have to change it a lot while seeing the results in the RPG Maker... So... it's kinda endless......

For example, some days ago, I was trying something new in the RPG Maker 2k3. I was using battle animations as battercharsets and it... was FRUSTRATING. I was positioning sprites that had the size of a RTP charset (so it was very very small) and when I would check how the animation would be in RPG Maker, everything was a little messed up and I knew that the process would be endless, once the sprites were small and I would have to make a LOT OF CHANGES in the image sheet until having them arranged perfectly.

And sometimes I find incredible that there are so many people making resources that are so well arranged and I think "They MUST have a secret to do it well", so if you guys know some way to make this work easier, please, share it with me. I would be very very very very very very very very grateful. Then, see ya!

[JayRay]

Well, as a fellow photoshopper myself, I have always found that the best way to make sure your sprites are perfectly alligned is to make use of the extra guide lines.

It's an extra step to be sure, but if you make sure that you have the right coordinates for say, top of character's head in the center of a tilesprite shape, you should see that each one follows in line perfectly.

Another method would be this... Take your seperate layers, and add something like a neonpink background. Place the one layer over the other, and use your little eyeball onn the layer to align it right. Then, using the Photoshop's Snap feature, you can make sure that each tiled sprite matches up perfectly with the one underneath, and going back and forth between layers allows you to see those two frames of animation as you would in the game anyway.